Callie and Finished are both right.
Abuse is cyclical which is why it is difficult to get away from, sometimes resulting in Stockholm Syndrome. And yes, after you've been in an abusive relationship, the healthiest and wisest thing you can do is take a significant amount of time to yourself to both heal and find yourself anew.
My 8-year relationship ended rather atypically.
It ended in high profile theft, drug abuse, self harm, emotional and sexual abuse, and enough blood to warrant me throwing out 4 beach towels after being harassed by the police that I myself called to have such the person removed from my apartment.
Sssooo, I spent the next 4 years single by choice, while I tried to reconstruct both my mind and my life.
That's how and why I ended up fighting alcoholism for about 7 years. Sidenote: Don't drink like that, you won't find any of the answers you actually need in the bottom of the bottle and in all actuality it will only make things worse.
Professional help does have merit to it, the drawback of course being the financial cost. But I mean, if you can afford it, that would be the greatest of help. Here in the U.S. rates are sky high, and basically the working class of people who need professional psychological help perhaps the most, basically can't afford it without it cutting into their cost of living between rent and car payments.
I keep thinking to myself that love is more fulfilling and more meaningful in older age than it is in youth. Because when we are young we are optimistic and hopeful in our ignorance about the world we live in and how it works, but when we are old we are humbled and sincere in our brokenness as humans.
Something that began to make sense to me after my experiences was what Rocky said to his son, "life is not about how hard you can hit, life is about how hard you can get hit and keep going."
The hardest lesson we have to learn in life, is that we have to life for what we need rather than what we want. It's the giant elephant in the room that everyone knows is there but nobody really wants to talk about because that's a really difficult conversation to have.
That was, honestly the draw in interest to Buddhist philosophy to me, because I remember some 10+ years ago that that's one of the ways in which people have taught themselves to learn to be okay with letting go of want and desire that is not the actual. Kind of like how I would love for this coffee that I'm drinking to instead be a 10$ coffee from Starbucks, but in all actuality this is just some cheap crap I got at the grocery store that'll last me about a month for the exact same price despite the fact that the quality is significantly less.
Life is a very contrary and counter-intuitive thing, which is part of its great confusion. Alan Watts even called it The Backwards Law. That's why weird things happen like the people who want to be successful, never end up being successful, and the people who don't care about success, end up being successful and then don't know how to manage or handle their success as a result. So that the unsuccessful person who wanted success is tasked in life with never being satisfied, and the successful person who took a life-changing risk because they didn't care about being successful is now tasked with trying to figure out how to handle and manage the difficulties and responsibilities of being successful.
Everyone deserves love, but defining love and finding love is difficult I think because we always look for it outside of ourselves and in all actuality it's mostly inside of ourselves. The perceptual difference you will find in this is an exact 180 degree opposite of how our default perceptions tend to relatively be before we find this out. Or to put it simply: People hate themselves because they look for love outside of themselves, and people love themselves when they look for love inside themselves for a long enough time. It can be quite challenging but does make a difference.
Okay, enough of my long-windedness in your thread. Sorry Cen.
![Thomas]](https://cdn.imagearchive.com/alonelylife/data/avatars/s/14/14186.jpg?1631136400){kind=avatar}
